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Google Chrome Broke my Workflow... and NIM

Chrome just broke the DevTools behavior NIM depends on. Our workflow is now nonfunctional thanks to an upstream Chromium change, and there’s no fix in sight. It feels like Google just trashed years of reliable tooling overnight.

Will

• 2 min read
Google Chrome Broke my Workflow... and NIM
Photo by - Landsmann - / Unsplash

(And no, I’m not happy about it.)

WOrkout available

Version 3.13.3 has been updated to provide a workaround by default which is simply to change a default NIM setting to use a redirect to the appspot hosted DevTools instead of the local version.

Users can of course change it however they want, but until Google/Chrome fixes this breaking change... the local "devtools://" scheme won't work.

Github Release v3.13.3

See the issue here...

Chromium
Debugging NIM to see the breaking error

For years, the NIM extension has relied on a specific Chrome behavior to function the way it does. It worked. It was stable. It let people get things done.

And then—without warning, without care, and without a migration path—Google Chrome changed upstream behavior in a way that completely breaks that workflow.

Here’s the upstream Chromium issue I’ve opened:

👉 Chromium Bug Tracker Issue:
issues.chromium.org/u/2/issues/470115241

This change isn’t some small edge case either. It affects the core functionality that NIM—and plenty of other tools—depend on.

So, what does this mean?

  • NIM’s old behavior is broken.
  • Workflows people depend on are now disrupted.
  • The fix isn’t trivial—and it sure isn’t something we caused.

And the worst part?

My hopes are not high that Chromium fixes this.

I want to believe we’ll see a patch. I want to believe they’ll acknowledge the regression. I want to believe someone upstream cares.

But if you’ve ever tried to get a Chromium regression fixed, you already know the odds aren’t great. And in this case, it feels like Google is doubling down on design decisions that ignore real-world developer workflows.

So here we are—rewriting, redesigning, and trying to rebuild something Google broke overnight.

And honestly?

Yeah. Fuck Google.

Because it’s pretty hard to watch a giant corporation break a working ecosystem, shrug, and walk away like nothing happened.

Stay tuned—there will be updates. I’m already exploring alternative approaches and fallback logic, and I’ll share progress as it happens.

But for now?
If you’re angry about this, trust me: you’re not alone.

— NIM Dev